"Using valuable food crops like corn and sugar cane to produce biofuels has been a highly controversial topic in the age of imminent food crises. But nobody is growing corn on the former strip mines of Eastern Kentucky."

"A federal magistrate judge recommended class-action status Wednesday for thousands of landowners in southwest Virginia who contend two energy companies cheated them out of tens of millions of dollars in royalty payments for natural gas they extracted from their properties."

"The presence of Union sentiment in East Tennessee was explained by the absence of slavery as well as the fact that the region was somewhat isolated from the rest of the South by the Appalachians and the Cumberland Plateau. But that same forbidding terrain also left it beyond the reach of even the most intrepid surveyors. The basic topography of the eastern Tennessee River Valley was fairly clear, but the complex contours of the Blue Ridge and adjacent ranges of the Appalachian system were still unknown, and only vaguely represented on maps on the eve of the war."

"Teach for America came to Central Appalachia three years ago, aiming to help school districts in the region find qualified applicants for hard-to-fill positions, and the organization is continuing to achieve this goal by helping two local school districts this year."

"Even as they knew their patients were dying, two doctors used rubber stamps to prescribe millions of doses of oxycodone to thousands of Appalachian customers, a federal prosecutor told a jury Friday. In a trial related to the nation's largest pill mill organization, Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Schwartz said the defendants prescribed and dispensed millions of pain pills that killed nine people. Seven of the dead patients were from Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia."

"Officials of Pike County, Kentucky, announced this week that Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, will pay $4 million to settle a lawsuit the county and state filed in 2007 seeking damages for the addiction OxyContin caused "after the company aggressively marketed it to doctors as a safe option for pain relief," Russ Cassady reports for the Appalachian News-Express in Pikeville."

"The University of Tennessee is officially seeking bidders who want to drill natural gas wells on land it owns on the Cumberland Plateau...The university says it plans to use revenue from the lease to study the effects of fracking on the environment."